Brief problem description
For a hobby I design and create little electronics projects based on the Microchip PIC processors. They have an excellent tool that includes an In-Circuit Debugger (ICD2) and they update their development tool often. However they have not created 64-bit drivers for the ICD2 hardware.
My PC where I'm running the PIC development tool is Vista 64-bit and it has bothered me for a while that I couldn't attach the debugging (ICD2) tool to it (it uses USB) since they didn't provide 64-bit drivers. I tried to run the development tool in Virtual PC 2005, but it didn't let me connect the ICD2 device over USB. I have an old Windows XP 32-bit machine, but it's slow and not convenient to do development on.
Solution
I came up with a thought that maybe someone had created a way to access another PCs USB ports over Ethernet. That's when I found the FabulaTech solution. I downloaded the trial and it worked EXCELLENT!
I could now plug-in the ICD2 on my XP 32-bit machine, run the USB over Network server on it and attach the ICD2 in my virtual machine (since I still must load drivers on the client side).
Hakan Lindestaf
Comment by FabulaTech:
Alternatively, it's possible to solve this task without using of the old 32-bit PC.
The ICD2 device, being plugged into the 64-bit PC can be shared even without having 64bit device drivers installed. To enable that, just configure "Share USB devices automatically" option on the Server side.